For those who missed the first series of The 4400, this is the story so far. And you will need to concentrate. Four thousand four hundred people, all of whom disappeared between 1946 and the modern day, have been deposited on a beach in Washington state. They haven't aged, have no recollection of their previous lives and know nothing of how they vanished. Many have acquired paranormal gifts, such as telepathy, which they have been putting to good use or bad. It is thought they were abducted by human beings from the future to prevent a disaster befalling Earth, but only one can remember where she was taken to. In a similar vein to The X Files, the stars of the show are two government agents, Tom Baldwin (Joel Gretsch, Taken) and Diana Skouris (Jacqueline McKenzie, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood), who are employed by National Threat Assessment Command (NTAC), set up to keep track of the 4,400 returnees. Meanwhile, one of the 4,400, Jordan Collier (Bill Campbell, Once and Again), has become the self-proclaimed figurehead of the group and is about to open the 4400 Centre, a cult for returnees and wannabes. Other significant characters include 4400s Lily and Richard Tyler and their baby, Isabelle, and eight-year-old Maia, who disappeared in 1946 and has been adopted by Skouris. Devotees of The 4400 will be eagerly anticipating the second series (TVB Pearl, Mondays at 10.35pm). The rest of us are likely to end up feeling like one of the 4,400 - as if we've been whisked away in time and plonked back down, non-plussed, in front of our television sets years later. It doesn't help that the opening episode is boring - and the acting isn't any great shakes. There's more charisma in Season of the Spirit Bear (Animal Planet, today at 9pm), a delightful programme about the cantankerous and reclusive sloth bear (pictured) of Sri Lanka. Once a year, during the drought, the trees of the Sri Lankan plains burst into a riot of blossoms and fruit. And it is the berries of the palu tree that lure the sloth bear into the open. It is a fussy eater. 'Sloth bears don't just start feeding at any old palu tree,' explains narrator Anita Kapoor. 'Like seasoned wine connoisseurs, they sample the fallen berries before deciding whether to dine at this tree or move to another one.' When a bear has found its tree, though, even leopards give it a wide berth. While the rains do eventually come to the Sri Lankan plains, it hasn't rained for three years in the desert around Lake Eyre, South Australia, where the men and women featured in Outback Cowboys: The Great Australian Cattle Drive (Discovery Channel, tonight at 9pm) make a living. This is the hottest and driest area of the Outback, with temperatures regularly reaching 50 degrees Celsius. The nearest community, Marree, is 80km away; the bright lights of Adelaide are 800km away. In this hostile landscape is the Dulkaninna cattle station, run by the Bell family since 1896. Here, like everywhere else, the cowboys' traditional methods of mustering cattle are dying out and horses are being replaced by four-wheel all-terrain vehicles. But the old ways are being revived for an unlikely reason - tourism. Outback Cowboys follows the preparations for a two-day cattle drive being laid on for a group of 20 tourists from Adelaide. 'I'm definitely worried about the horses,' says one holidaymaker. 'The only time I've ever been near one, it sniffed me and I ran for about a kilometre.' Understandably, the tour operator has left nothing to chance; the horses chosen for the journey look half asleep and a priest has been laid on for the trip. This is one of those weeks in television where fact is definitely more entertaining than fiction.